Roof Repair and Roofers in Woodland Hills

North of Ventura Boulevard the neighborhood is flat, mostly tract, and mostly composition shingle. Victor Girard bought 2,886 acres out here in 1922 and cut them into 6,826 lots, then the 1929 crash stopped him cold. The streets did not fill until the leftover Girard lots were built out through the postwar years and on into the 1960s and 1970s. Those are the roofs that take the heat first. Asphalt does not fail all at once in this climate. It bakes, the mat goes brittle, granules end up in the gutter, and the tabs curl at the corners and lift in the first hard wind. South and west slopes go years ahead of the north side of the same house, so half a roof can look sound from the street while the other half is finished.

South of the boulevard is a different neighborhood. The streets climb toward Mulholland and Topanga Canyon, the houses went up one at a time, and the roofs run to tile, standing seam metal and the flat and low-slope decks that came with 1960s and 1970s hillside architecture. Access is the first thing we look at up there. Narrow streets, no room for a dumpster, a carport where a driveway would be and a house sitting a flight of stairs below the road all add hours to a tear-off that a flat lot north of the boulevard would not.

Then there are the trees. Girard planted something like 120,000 eucalyptus, pepper and other shade trees to sell his lots, and when the place renamed itself Woodland Hills it named itself after them. They are a century old now and they are the tallest thing standing over most of these roofs. Eucalyptus, pepper and the native oaks drop year round. That litter packs valleys, plugs gutters and holds water against the shingle long after the rest of the roof has dried. In the hills it is also the thing an ember lands in.

Does the heat out here shorten a roof?

It shortens everything on the roof that is made of oil. Asphalt shingle, the mastic at a vent collar, the sealant on a skylight curb and the cap sheet on a low-slope deck all age on temperature, and a roof deck in Woodland Hills runs well above whatever the forecast says the air is doing. Attic ventilation is the piece homeowners skip and the piece that matters most here, because a roof that cannot exhaust heat cooks its own underlayment from underneath. In the hills that comes with a catch. The vents moving that heat are also how embers get in.

I have solar on a roof from the 1970s. What should I do first?

Look at the roof before the panels force the question. Plenty of these roofs picked up an array at some point, and arrays usually went onto whatever roof was already up there. Panels shade the covering they sit on, but the edges, the walkways between rows and everything around the penetrations keep aging on schedule, and every standoff is a hole in a roof that is already working hard. If the roof is close to needing replacement anyway, taking the array off and putting it back once during a planned re-roof runs roughly $4,000 to $10,000 on top of the roof. Finding out afterward means paying that a second time.